We feel fascinated by leaders & celebrities because they enhance the credibility of our self-esteem - as it is based on meeting cultural standards that they exceed. The belief in the greater value & legacy of their cultural contribution helps us to believe in the worth & meaning of our own more modest contribution. This in turn reassures us that we have at least a minimum share in the sense of legacy or symbolic immortality that comes from contributing to a culture that lives on beyond our deaths.This symbolic immortality that leaders and celebrities lend credibility to was in the past a literal form of immortality, as in the first tyrannies of the Ancient World, when Kings and Pharaohs were considered living Gods of a religion that would grant you an afterlife if you followed its rules. Egalitarian primitives were not so much subject to the authority of the living as they were of the dead: The Spirits and Ancestors that they worshipped in exchange for immortality.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlLWp9gua50